> "1. People have wildly incorrect intuitions about where land value is concentrated"
Fwiw this sort of land value gradient has been studied in economics for ages. See papers on monocentric city model, going back to Alonso (1964), Muth (1969), and Mills (1967). Or even further back, von Thünen was talking back in 1826 about how land values spike as you get closer to the marketplace.
> I was waiting to read about what these "wildly incorrect intuitions" were, but it's never explained. The maps correctly matched my own intuitions.
If you are into land value tax discourse maybe, but from my experience at least there is a big lack of awareness of the impact of economic activities on land values as they are not reflected by anything that people get in contact with. That's especially true because neither rents nor property taxes (the one thing people might have exposure to) fully capture it.
Author here. Our blog generally concerns property tax reform for our regular readership which is admittedly less clear to a new reader coming in cold: the intuitions I’m referring to is the average homeowner kind of assumes any tax reform (such as shifting taxes off buildings and onto land) is designed to impoverish them personally. The purpose of these maps is to show such people where land value in cities is really concentrated - Ie, not the m the suburbs. Mono centric city value might be intuitive to academics, but it’s not among regular everyday people.
This is great, and it also feels like a great way to answer the question "Where should I buy a house if I want to be close to the center but not in the expensive area?".
> Let’s play a guessing game. How much more valuable is land in Manhattan than in the Bronx? Take a guess, then scroll down for the answer.
As someone who has never been in New York and doesn't live in the US, I knew beforehand that I would fail this test very hard, haha.
But I'm not a fan of these particular maps because the use of 3d makes them harder to read. The isometric view and rotation away from north at the top break conventions that people use to orient themselves in the map and connect it to their lived experiences on the ground. I'm reasonably familiar with NYC geography, and I could not immediately recognize the landscape I was looking at in these maps. Ironically, it was only because I already knew the answer to the question that I could do so: "oh that huge green spike must be Manhattan".
I think a 2d choropleth map with a diverging color scale centered on the mean value would work better.
The main purpose of the 3D is to communicate the extreme differences in scale of value, which chloropleth alone doesn’t always get across as it flattens the magnitude disparity. Keeping true north to avoid confusion is a good point.
Is "land value" the right term here? The NYC example uses assessed property value, which I think is a function of both the land under a property and the building itself. In that case, these "taller means more valuable" graphics are at least partially reflecting the fact that a tall building is probably more valuable than the short one next to it?
Land and "improvements" are assessed separately, and I believe this is plotting just the assessed land values. In the small text about each map, it says to use the settings to switch to full assessed value or improvements. But still, it's very hard to actually assess land value in an area like Manhattan where there are basically no land-only transactions
Fwiw this sort of land value gradient has been studied in economics for ages. See papers on monocentric city model, going back to Alonso (1964), Muth (1969), and Mills (1967). Or even further back, von Thünen was talking back in 1826 about how land values spike as you get closer to the marketplace.
If you are into land value tax discourse maybe, but from my experience at least there is a big lack of awareness of the impact of economic activities on land values as they are not reflected by anything that people get in contact with. That's especially true because neither rents nor property taxes (the one thing people might have exposure to) fully capture it.
> Let’s play a guessing game. How much more valuable is land in Manhattan than in the Bronx? Take a guess, then scroll down for the answer.
As someone who has never been in New York and doesn't live in the US, I knew beforehand that I would fail this test very hard, haha.
But I'm not a fan of these particular maps because the use of 3d makes them harder to read. The isometric view and rotation away from north at the top break conventions that people use to orient themselves in the map and connect it to their lived experiences on the ground. I'm reasonably familiar with NYC geography, and I could not immediately recognize the landscape I was looking at in these maps. Ironically, it was only because I already knew the answer to the question that I could do so: "oh that huge green spike must be Manhattan".
I think a 2d choropleth map with a diverging color scale centered on the mean value would work better.
What is the problem this visualization seeks to make obvious? Is it just neat to think about and make?
https://open.substack.com/pub/progressandpoverty/p/enacting-...